Friday, June 6, 2014

The D-Day Legacy We’ve Created 70 Years Later

So
today is the 70th anniversary of D-Day. I did a quick Google search
of it, and here’s the summary I found on
www.army.mil (Incidentally, the pre-Nazi partiers [i.e. socialists] at
Google didn’t see fit to recognize this hugely important date on their home
page. Go figure.):

“On
June 6, 1944, more than 160,000 Allied troops landed along a 50-mile stretch of
heavily-fortified French coastline, to fight Nazi Germany on the beaches of
Normandy, France. Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower called the operation a crusade in
which, ‘we will accept nothing less than full victory.’ More than 5,000 Ships
and 13,000 aircraft supported the D-Day invasion, and by day’s end, the Allies
gained a foot-hold in Continental Europe. The cost in lives on D-Day was high.
More than 9,000 Allied Soldiers were killed or wounded, but their sacrifice
allowed more than 100,000 Soldiers to begin the slow, hard slog across Europe,
to defeat Adolph Hitler’s crack troops.”

Let’s
highlight the first part of that last sentence: “More than 9,000 Allied
Soldiers were killed or wounded.” For what? To give other people a chance at
freedom. You think they enjoyed storming those Normandy beaches knowing the
likelihood that they were going to die, probably slowly and painfully from
enemy bullets lodged in their stomachs or spines or lungs?

I
somehow doubt the experience was desirable at all. But the outcome was. Those
9,000 and their fellow soldiers who survived saved millions of lives through
their heroic actions. We owe them and the rest of our military personnel (minus
Bowe Bergdahl) for their courageous call to arms over the years.

We
owe them, but we’re not really acknowledging that these days, are we? Not when we’re
behaving as badly as we are, treating our country like a giant trash heap for
our already-failed social experiments, unsustainable political theories and
arrogant attempts to make ourselves God.

Looking
over the headlines this morning, I was underwhelmed by the stories about yet
another school shooting, people who stole groceries out of a fatal-accident victim’s
car while her two young sons lay broken in the backseat, and of the President
of the United States remaining entirely unrepentant for endangering countless
Americans through yet another display of his conceit and recklessness.

I
say “underwhelmed” because this is the norm. This is what we can expect day to
day since we don’t value life. Not like we should, and certainly not in the
over-the-top honorable way those D-Day soldiers did back 70 years ago.

They
died giving all of us a chance at freedom. And we, as their fellow countrymen,
are spitting on that chance… and on them.

I
have to wonder whether those past heroes would have been so fast to defend our
present if they could have seen into the future.